Thursday Quotables: Down Among the Sticks and Bones

Welcome to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week. Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire(released 2017)

This book is simply beautiful and brilliant, and a perfect companion to Every Heart A Doorway. I can’t help gushing over the writing throughout the book. For this week’s selection, I’m going with a couple of passages from the earlier parts of the book, before the storyline enters a more magical domain. Here, the focus is on parenting and the damage so easily inflicted on the souls of children.

This, you see, is the true danger of children: they are ambushes, each and every one of them. A person may look at someone else’s child and see only the surface, the shiny shoes or the perfect curls. They do not see the tears and the tantrums, the late nights, the sleepless hours, the worry. They do not even see the love, not really. It can be easy, when looking at children from the outside, to believe that they are things, dolls designed and programmed by their parents to behave in one manner, following one set of rules. It can be easy, when standing on the lofty shores of adulthood, not to remember that every adult was once a child, with ideas and ambitions of their own.

It can be easy, in the end, to forget that children are people, and that people will do what people will do, the consequences be damned.

Another little heartbreaking snippet, when the main characters’ only source of adult comfort and caring is kicked out of their lives:

Louise Wolcott slipped out of her granddaughters’ lives as easily as she had slipped into them, becoming a distant name that sent birthday cards and the occasional gift (most confiscated by her son and daughter-in-law), and was one more piece of final, irrefutable proof that adults, in the end, were not and never to be trusted. There were worse lessons for the girls to learn.

This one, at least, might have a chance to save their lives.

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

If you’d like to participate in Thursday Quotables, it’s really simple:

Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now. And please be sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com), if you’d be so kind!

Add your Thursday Quotables post link in the comments section below… and I’d love it if you’d leave a comment about my quote for this week too.

Be sure to visit other linked blogs to view their Thursday Quotables, and have fun!

3 thoughts on “Thursday Quotables: Down Among the Sticks and Bones”

Those are awesome quotes indeed. I had a very good quote this week as well, but I shared it on instagram cause it’s half a page long. It was about wives and husbands in the 50’s. I can pull up the link if you want, it was pretty strong too.

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I occasionally receive review copies of books from publishers or via NetGalley. For all reviews, the source of the book I’m reviewing is identified in the details section at the end of the review. All reviews reflect my honest opinions, regardless of source.